Alternatives to the H-Bomb

...an internationalism which is not necessary to the enemy, but is to us...

...the United States, Britain and France...

...Twenty-three years later, what Norman Angell foresaw had happened...

...The existence of NATO and the successful defense of the Republic of Korea against Communist aggression in 1950 make new military ventures on the part of the Soviet Union unlikely...

...Hans Kohn is one of the great authorities on nationalism...

...The constitution of the Union will provide for joint organs of defense, foreign, financial and economic policies...

...That unity we have not attained, even for the purposes of the war, because we have refused to recognize its necessary conditions...

...Thus, the two ancient realms of Britain and France were to enter a union for war and peace...

...a unity which autocracy achieves at the cost of freedom and human worth...

...This pattern of events, which points so surely to ultimate disaster, can be changed if only the peoples of the West have the wisdom to make a complete break with many things of the past and show a willingness to do something new and challenging...

...Such a unity would provide a growing feeling of strength in the democracies and lessen fears and apprehensions...

...It is a long step from declarations by Norman Angell and Winston Churchill, by Morrison and Eisenhower to the change in public attitudes which alone can turn these declarations into reality...

...McCarthyism is only one of the expressions of this withdrawal into nationalism...

...It goes hand in hand with the restrictions on travel and the exchange of ideas, the refusal of passports and visas, as if a few visiting fellow-travelers could undermine the security or democratic faith of the strongest democratic nation on earth...

...Impatient and eager for clear-cut decisions, addicted to illusions and oversimplifications in international relations, most Americans expected "showdown with the Soviet Union within a very few years and believed that the near future would bring only the choice between war and agreed-upon peace...

...And on April 2, 1952 General Dwight D. Eisenhower said: "If the free nations are to remain secure, our peoples must march together, agreed on common goals, and win that cooperative unity possible only in a free society...

...Return to the old relationships after the war will sooner or later doom the democratic nations, however powerful each may be individually, to subjugation in detail by a group inferior in power but superior in material unity...

...He has also taught at Harvard, California, Colorado, Yale, Dartmouth and Northwestern Universities...

...Churchill's warning and took up the traditional British policy in the Middle East...

...In his final speech to the Nineteenth Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, Stalin said that in the West "the banner of national independence and national sovereignty has been thrown overboard...

...The two governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations but one Franco-British union...

...Many regarded the treaty as merely an ad hoc military defensive alliance against the threat of armed aggression by Communist Russia, and, unfortunately, the reality of NATO for the first five years of its existence seems to bear out this very limited concept...

...the Russians under Lenin and Stalin went even further in their condemnation of the West and their conviction that the West was doomed...

...All these weaknesses can be overcome only by an increased and permanent consultation among the democracies on all questions of foreign and military policy and of economic and cultural interchange...

...The North Atlantic Pact is an act of faith in the destiny of Western civilization," Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium declared...

...It places in the service of this civilization and of peace the most powerful means of defense that has ever been created...

...Carlo Sforza of Italy hoped that the pact would be the beginning of an organic growth of liberty like the English Magna Carta, "on one side intangibles, on the other side a continuous creation...

...The strongest among the democratic nations seems most paralyzed by fear in its constructive thinking...

...but he also said, "We are joined by a common heritage of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law...

...This new "Truman Doctrine" formed the historical landmark in America's turn from hemispheric isolationism to worldwide cooperation and responsibility...

...Some of the speakers at the signing of the pact stressed the fact that NATO should be not a military alliance, but a closer union of the Western democracies based upon common traditions...

...but, at the same time, the surviving strength of traditional American isolationism prevented the growth of NATO into something more than a defensive military alliance...

...This trend was foreseen, and desired, by Stalin in his Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR in October 1952...

...We are now concentrating on strengthening our defenses and insuring our Western way of life against risk of aggression, but we must not forget the long-term objectives and the desperate need for unity among free men...

...It seems almost as if the nations of the West have been, for decades, blindly enacting parts in a drama that could have been written by Lenin...

...Churchill of trying to mobilize the United States to fight the battles of the British Empire...

...not only in France, but in the United States...

...The nations sink back into the accustomed rut of their "independent" nationalism, as they did after World War I and as they tried to do immediately after World War II...

...a kind and degree of democratic internationalism to which current political ideas and feelings are hostile...

...And Ernest Bevin of Britain visualized the realization of the hopes which Norman Angell had voiced in 1917...

...The West...

...But the Communists will, for any foreseeable future and with all the means at their disposal, continue the war against Western civilization, a war of nerves, a political and psychological war which cannot be countered by arms alone...

...In 1917, Norman Angell wrote in The Political Conditions of Allied Success: "The survival of the Western democracies, insofar as that is a matter of the effective use of their force, depends upon their capacity to use it as a unit, during the war and after...

...The foreign policy of the Western democracies should have one goal: to preserve and strengthen the Western way of life and to prevent war...

...The reception of Churchill's famous speech in Fulton, Missouri in February 1946, demanding cooperation of the democracies in the face of the Soviet menace, received a partly hostile and partly cool reception in the United States...

...all the accumulated distrust and memories of friction of many centuries were brushed away...

...The very young democratic internationalism gave way to the ingrained forces of nationalism under various names...

...But there was little understanding of the fundamental need for a union of democracies...

...which has formed the basis of the Soviet "peace" policy ever since...

...with all emphasis upon temporary military measures...

...The Communists wish to play America off against Britain, fiance against Germany, in the hope of bringing about those conflicts and wars among the democracies which Stalin predicted in 1952 when he stated that war between the Soviet Union and Western nations was less likely than war between the "capitalist" countries...

...The ultimate effect upon democracy and peace in Europe and beyond would have been incalculable...

...it would, at the same time, quench the Communist hopes of dividing the West and thereby destroying Western civilization...

...The concept of the North Atlantic Treaty was the supreme achievement and the most mature expression of the new American foreign policy...

...No single official document shows a greater understanding of the nature of the challenge and of the Western response to it: "At this most fateful moment in the history of the modern world," the British proposal to France read, "the Governments of the United Kingdom and the French Republic make this declaration of indissoluble union and unyielding resolution in their common defense of justice and freedom, against subjection to a system which reduces mankind to a life of robots and slaves...

...When the danger of Communist military aggression did not materialize, when Yugoslavia, Iran and West Berlin were not invaded, the urgency of NATO diminished in the eyes of the Western nations...

...This has been expressed by many leading statesmen of the free world in recent years...

...it would make that civilization safe against all its enemies, whether fascism or Communism, Chinese or Japanese imperialism, or any possible combination of those forces which, though theoretically hostile to each other, easily unite for the overthrow of the common enemy, the West...

...They wish, therefore, to intensify everywhere the divisions within and among the democratic nations, to support all nationalist trends and back all demands for "going it alone...

...Thus...

...NATO was envisaged by many not as a permanent "cohesive organism" to insure the strength of Western civilization and to lay the foundations of a democratic internationalism, but as a passing phase...

...and that is as true of Britain and France as of the United States...

...By assuming leadership, the United States, which is in many ways the product of all the forces of Western civilization, could repay its debt to them by pointing the way to their unification, not only to prevent war but to preserve and strengthen the Western way of life...

...All these slogans and movements not only undermine the democratic unity which alone can assure peace, but also increase fear and suspicion in the democratic camp...

...At last," he said, "democracy is no longer a series of isolated units...

...Among his many books are The Idea of Nationalism, Prophets and Peoples, The Twentieth Century: A Midway Account of the Western World, Revolutions and Dictatorships, and World Order in Historical Perspective...

...since then, he has been Professor of History at the City College of New York...

...It leads to superfluous and sensational loyalty investigations of men like Dr...

...For that purpose, more daring and imaginative leadership will be needed in the Western world than is at present apparent...

...If the French Cabinet had accepted the British proposal, the exile governments of Norway and the Netherlands, then in London, would have joined the union...

...Barely a year later, in March 1947, the American Government, by extending protection to Turkey and Greece, recognized the sanity of Mr...

...President Truman rightly pointed out that, if an Atlantic Pact had existed in 1914 and 1939, it would have prevented the acts of aggression which led to two World Wars...

...America first," "la France seule" and whatever slogans in various countries express the desire for political, economic and cultural "independence" from the oilier nations of Western civilization...

...Every citizen of France will enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain, every British subject will become a citizen of France...

...understood the nature of the menace neither in World War I nor in World War II...

...At that critical moment, in June 1940, the British Government took a step of unprecedented daring...

...Around an Anglo-American nucleus, the democratic forces not only of the smaller Western countries but of France, Germany and Italy could successfully overcome the anti-Western temptations rooted in some political traditions and partly in the social structure of these great nations which have contributed so much to Western civilization...

...The Communists are in no position to wage open war against the united democracies or to undermine an organized democratic international community by their propaganda...

...Nor is a world war probable...

...Habits of discussing and deciding common issues in common must be developed by the creation of appropriate institutions...

...Born in Prague, he came to the United States in 1933...

...At the NATO meeting in Ottawa in September 1951, Herbert Morrison of Britain declared: "Besides developing to the utmost our cooperation under this treaty in the problems of defense, I am sure we should strive by every possible means to increase the common action and common thinking of the Atlantic powers in matters of peace until eventually we create a true community or union within the free world...

...Many Americans accused Mr...

...A logical step on this road was the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty two years later, in April 1949, in Washington...

...Many even went so far as to prefer the Soviet Union to "imperialist" Britain and to see in British imperialism the chief danger after World War II...

...The inroads of Communism into Europe after World War II would have been stopped at the onset, the specter of a new German nationalism would not have haunted the West, the basis for democracy in France, Italy and Germany would have been mightily strengthened...

...But, from the beginning, the statesmen signing the treaty had a higher vision...

...In 1940, the whole European Continent, with the exception of Switzerland and Sweden, was in the hands of dictators who, though jealous of one another, were united in their rejection of modern Western civilization...

...There can be no doubt that it is up to you, representatives of the Communist and democratic parties, to raise the banner and carry it forward, if you want to be patriots for your countries, and if you want to be the leading force of nations...

...I am sure that we should look forward to the day when in the fullness of time there will be a common citizenship for all the peoples in the North Atlantic community, with all the barriers to thought, travel, trade and understanding swept away...

...If the Western democracies wish to survive, without being forced by fear or panic into losing the very substance of their way of life, they must, far beyond purely military means, create a community of Western democracies with a common foreign and economic policy...

...isolationism, neutralism, concern for national sovereignty and independence...

...it is fundamentally and traditionally more anti-British than anti-Russian, more anti-liberal than anti-Communist...

...From 1934 to 1949, he was Professor of History at Smith College...

...It has become a cohesive organism, determined to fulfil its great purpose...

...Oppenheimer and Dr...

...Today, we seem to be approaching the nadir of democratic internationalism in the leading democracies...

...The Germans regarded World War I and World War II as primarily wars against the West...

...As far as the future can be foreseen, there exists no possibility of a real agreement with the Commuist world in its present state of mind...

...The pact was due to American initiative...

...Even more damaging to America's leadership is the way in which not so much the American Government as influential elements in the American people wish to exercise this leadership, claiming for the United States not the position of primus inter pares in a democratic community of equals but that of the power calling the tune and demanding "loyal" cooperation on the part of America's allies without rendering equally "loyal" cooperation to those allies...

...Leading circles in America during World War II regarded the Soviet Union and Great Britain as allies with an equal claim on America's sympathy and support...

...Kohn also edited German History: Some New German Views, just published by Beacon Press, and has contributed to numerous encyclopedias, periodicals and scholarly journals...

...Bunche which must arouse the suspicion that the American democracy is as honeycombed with traitors as the Communist regimes seem to be...

...Communist propaganda during the last three years has been directed toward undermining democratic internationalism and inflaming and exploiting sentiments of nationalism and sovereignty everywhere...